I’m trying to figure out how much of a response to give, and how to balance saying what I believe vs. avoiding any chance to make people feel unwelcome, or inflicting an unpleasant politicized debate on people who don’t want to read it. This comment is a bad compromise between all these things and I apologize for it, but:
I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. I think “everyone knows” (in Zvi’s sense of the term, where it’s such strong conventional wisdom that nobody ever checks if it’s true ) that the typical response to rape accusations is to challenge and victim-blame survivors. And that although this may be true in some times and places, the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened—immediate belief by anyone who didn’t know the situation, and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it’s useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.
(this is also why I stressed the existence of the amazing Community Safety team—I think “everyone knows” that EA doesn’t do anything to hold men accountable for harm, whereas in fact it tries incredibly hard to do this and I’m super impressed by everyone involved)
I acknowledge that makes it sound like we have opposing cultural goals—you want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable expressing out that EA’s culture might be harmful to women, I want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable pushing back against claims to that effect which aren’t true. I think there is some subtle complicated sense in which we might not actually have opposing cultural goals, but I agree to a first-order approximation they sure do seem different. And I realize this is an annoyingly stereotypical situation - I, as a cis man, coming into a thread like this and saying I’m worried about a false accusations and chilling effects. My only two defenses are, first, that I only got this way because of specific real and harmful false accusations, that I tried to do an extreme amount of homework on them before calling false, and that I only ever bring up in the context of defending my decision there. And second, that I hope I’m possible to work with and feel safe around, despite my cultural goals, because I want to have a firm deontological commitment to promoting true things and opposing false things, in a way that doesn’t refer to my broader cultural goals at any point.
Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I’m coming in with a stronger prior from “the outside world”, where I’ve seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn’t be at odds, and that’s what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn’t want people to come away from your comment thinking “ah, Maya’s wrong and people shouldn’t criticize EA culture.” I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don’t rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn’t expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)
You’re probably right that it’s not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I’m trying to figure out how much of a response to give, and how to balance saying what I believe vs. avoiding any chance to make people feel unwelcome, or inflicting an unpleasant politicized debate on people who don’t want to read it. This comment is a bad compromise between all these things and I apologize for it, but:
I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. I think “everyone knows” (in Zvi’s sense of the term, where it’s such strong conventional wisdom that nobody ever checks if it’s true ) that the typical response to rape accusations is to challenge and victim-blame survivors. And that although this may be true in some times and places, the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened—immediate belief by anyone who didn’t know the situation, and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it’s useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.
(this is also why I stressed the existence of the amazing Community Safety team—I think “everyone knows” that EA doesn’t do anything to hold men accountable for harm, whereas in fact it tries incredibly hard to do this and I’m super impressed by everyone involved)
I acknowledge that makes it sound like we have opposing cultural goals—you want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable expressing out that EA’s culture might be harmful to women, I want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable pushing back against claims to that effect which aren’t true. I think there is some subtle complicated sense in which we might not actually have opposing cultural goals, but I agree to a first-order approximation they sure do seem different. And I realize this is an annoyingly stereotypical situation - I, as a cis man, coming into a thread like this and saying I’m worried about a false accusations and chilling effects. My only two defenses are, first, that I only got this way because of specific real and harmful false accusations, that I tried to do an extreme amount of homework on them before calling false, and that I only ever bring up in the context of defending my decision there. And second, that I hope I’m possible to work with and feel safe around, despite my cultural goals, because I want to have a firm deontological commitment to promoting true things and opposing false things, in a way that doesn’t refer to my broader cultural goals at any point.
Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I’m coming in with a stronger prior from “the outside world”, where I’ve seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn’t be at odds, and that’s what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn’t want people to come away from your comment thinking “ah, Maya’s wrong and people shouldn’t criticize EA culture.” I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don’t rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn’t expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)
You’re probably right that it’s not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!